Last thing on Friday I helped young start up and successful contemporary arts organisation Addict Dance Company build a free WordPress site. Building a website using this CMS is not a hard job, anyone can do it.
Thats the point. Oh yes and its free.
Yes you can use the self hosted service from wordpress.org, but at this point Addict Dance are exploring web 2.0 in connection with their business.
What I did was explain the use of web based services and the potential impact on a young vibrant arts based organisation like Addict Dance. This got me in to thinking about the kind of advice that I give students, start ups and established organisations.
Highlighting the need of a digital strategy in a post modern bites based society we looked at key areas of participation and integration. As Addict Dance is a visual based organisation that mainly works with young urban dancers we decided key areas or participation:
Video; Using Tubemogul to aggregate to the main video providers would provide a quick clean and manageable solution for the masses of video Addict produce.
Photos: Flickr will provide hosting and aggregation for images that again the organisation produce regularly.
Audio; Not many people are doing audio and certainly in a visual based company such as Addict this is some thing they had not considered. However as the created and many of the dancers have access to iPhones/iPod touch devices Audioboo would provide another clear channel of participation.
Facebook: They have a buoyant Facebook page and to continue to use this as part or their stratergie at this point certainly makes sense.
The above areas of social media participation don’t replace what Addict Dance are already good at, it adds value and allows interaction on a alternate level that other organisations in their area do not currently operate in.
Guerilla Bass 